From Dust Bowl to Digital Age: Decoding Federal Overreach and Local Success
Historical failures and recent successes offer a roadmap for future government strategies to enhance communities, economy
Welcome to the latest TL;dr edition of Good Government Files. This issue delves into the dynamic world of government program development, evaluating approaches from community-driven initiatives to centralized federal programs to public-private partnerships. We’ll sandwich a cautionary tale of bureaucratic hubris between two slices of collaborative success. Together, they offer valuable lessons for local government leaders.
Can skateboarding really transform cities? And what can a failed Depression-era farm program teach us about the limits of federal power? Dive in to find out!
Key Highlights:
Community Transformation through Skateable Spaces: Explore how skate parks are revitalizing urban areas and reducing crime.
The Limits of Centralized Planning: Learn from a historical federal program's failure and its implications for modern policymaking.
Public-Private Partnerships FTW: Understand the significance of Samsung’s $45 billion investment in Central Texas and its implications for local and national economies.
Skateboarding’s Latest Trick: Reviving Cities
Gary Moskowitz relates how new skate plazas in cities like San Francisco, Paris, and New York are transforming urban spaces into safer, more dynamic areas in a May 6 piece for Reasons To Be Cheerful. The article highlights the community-building effects of making public spaces skate-friendly, turning previously underutilized or problematic areas into vibrant community hubs that promote safety, inclusivity, and economic revitalization.
A Manhattan Project. During the pandemic Rosa Chang got frustrated at the lack of outdoor community spaces in her densely populated Manhattan neighborhood. She began advocating for a 9-acre space under a bridge to be repurposed. Two years later, she watched as City officials cut the ribbon on a new public space that featured a skate park along with park benches and basketball and pickleball courts. “I was just naive enough to have the conviction that this must be done,” Chang said. “It took community advocates and skaters to make this happen. This project was so ripe with potential for economic revitalization for a long-ailing neighborhood.”
Meanwhile, on the West Coast. About the same time, a similar effort was underway in San Francisco at U.N. Plaza, a large public space near City Hall. Drug dealing, homelessness, public urination and selling of stolen goods had plagued the plaza. To encourage activity and positive community gatherings, city officials decided to make skateboarding a key feature of the revitalized plaza and teamed up with local skateboarding advocates on the design. In December 2023, city officials unveiled a 13,000-foot skate plaza, alongside exercise stations, ping pong and Teqball tables, and chess tables. Cost: $2 million. Result: Daytime drug-related incidents at the plaza have dropped by 64 percent. “We showed the city that we can do a lot with a little,” says Ashley Rehfeld, a marketing director with skateboarding company Deluxe Distribution who was involved in planning the plaza. “It was kind of a hilarious evolution of a city seeing how skating can be part of a solution, not a problem, but we got there. If you want a vibrant city for all groups, you have to build it with key people, then people will come. The city trusted us.”
Vive la France! San Francisco’s municipal officials had been inspired by the Paris skate plaza at Place de la République. In the 2010s, crime and homelessness in the plaza rose to the point locals quit going there. Volcom, a skate and surf apparel company that recently opened a store in the neighborhood agreed to get involved. Architect Paolo Guidi collaborated with Volcom to design something that looked like a sculpture rising up out of the ground. The project took a year to finish. “We had to be respectful of the way people like to be on the plaza, to be able to be active but also sit, and also make the space inviting for girls and boys,” Guidi says. “If seven-year-old girls and 70-year-old women can feel good in a space, then it’s good. If mom and dad and the kids can come, then it is safe and it changes the way people think about it.”
What a Depression-Era Farm Program Gone Awry Shows About the Limits of Federal Power
Kevin R. Kosar illustrates the perils of a completely top-down approach to federal problem solving in an April 10 essay in The Dispatch. Kosar argues the failure of Casa Grande Farm is crucial for contemporary policymakers to understand. Here are my takeaways:
A Problem Worth Solving: “In 1937, a combination of Dust Bowl-era weather, collapsing food prices during the Great Depression, and the rise of mechanized mega-farms displacing family farms produced a migrant crisis,” Kosar writes. “To respond, President Franklin Roosevelt issued an executive order establishing the Farm Security Administration (FSA) to propose solutions for rural poverty.”
Good Intentions + Smart Planners = No Guarantee of Success. The FSA created the Casa Grande Farm project in response. Rexford Tugwell, a Columbia University economist who headed the FSA, proposed providing farmers with homes and land. The FSA bought land in Pinal County, Arizona, and built infrastructure, but later switched to a cooperative farming model to reduce risks. Despite initial success and profitability, the Casa Grande project failed by 1944 due to internal power struggles and conflicts over the farm’s operations. Federal policymaking “is an inherently fraught enterprise,” Kosar writes. “So many things can go wrong even when you have the smartest people with the best intentions in the room.”
Limits of Centralized Planning: Planners failed to foresee the consequences of switching from stand-alone farms to a cooperative. “Though some members of Congress, who were little consulted, thought Casa Grande looked like Soviet collectivism, to Tugwell and his team the plan looked smart and sensible,” Kosar writes. To succeed with this kind of top-down approach to problem solving requires foresight that few possess. “People in Washington decide that something should be done, and then coordinate a lot of bureaucrats, state and local officials, and the policy’s beneficiaries to dutifully follow their plan,” Kosar writes. “Federal policymaking presumes policymakers have all the information they need, that the plan is sound, and that everyone involved has a shared understanding of the plan and their role in it. Those are big assumptions, and rarely do they hold.”
Samsung's Texas Expansion Escalates from BIG to HUGE with $45 Billion Investment Boost Through CHIPS Act
When Samsung Electronics revealed in 2021 it would spend $17 billion to build a next-generation chip manufacturing plant in Taylor, Texas, it was a BIG deal. Last month, it went from BIG to HUGE when Samsung announced it would use $6.4 billion in CHIPS Act funds to super-size its investment to $45 billion in Central Texas, where it already has a chip fab in Austin. Here are my takeaways.
Local Governments Led the Way: Williamson County and the City of Taylor approved the incentive programs that drew Samsung’s investment in their community, which is 30 minutes outside of Austin. Competition for the next-gen Samsung plant was fierce. The city and county package was good enough to entice Samsung to break ground in 2022 on a 4.7 million square foot facility expected to employ 2,000 when complete. At the time, there was speculation the project could be even bigger if the then-proposed federal CHIPS Act was passed.
Federal Government Does Its Part: The U.S. Congress did so in August 2022, and Samsung indeed increased the scope of its project. The additional public-private investment will create what federal officials called “a comprehensive advanced manufacturing ecosystem” in Central Texas. “Samsung plans to add an advanced packaging facility for both memory and logic chips, which is a monumental addition because that piece of the process is typically handled in locales like Taiwan, officials said,” according to an Austin Business Journal article on the announcement.
Rumors of the CHIPS Act Demise Were Greatly Exaggerated. A March 7 op-ed in The Hill argued DEI (Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion) requirements embedded in the act kept Samsung, Intel and the Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company (TSMC) from seeking CHIPS funding. It noted all had recently delayed work on production facilities. “The CHIPS Act is dead,” it concluded. Something sure changed, because all three companies had major announcements over the next 30 days touting a combined $205 billion in investments with the help of CHIPS Act funding.
In Other’s Words
James Simons, arguably the most successful investor of all time, died Friday. He introduced quantitative investing, i.e. trading on algorithms, to the market. In 2010, he said these five guiding principles “have been useful in my life and careers.”1
Do something new; don’t run with the pack. I am not such a fast runner. If I am one of N people all working on the same problem, there is very little chance I will win. If I can think of a new problem in a new area, that will give me a chance.
Surround yourself with the smartest people you can find. When you see such a person, do all you can to get them on board. That extends your reach, and terrific people are usually fun to work with.
Be guided by beauty. This is obviously true in doing mathematics or writing poetry, but it is also true in fashioning an organization that is running extremely well and accomplishing its mission with excellence.
Don’t give up easily. Some things take much longer than one initially expects. If the goal is worth achieving, just stick with it.
Hope for good luck!
One More Thing
The Beloved Wife and I are heading out of town this week, so there will be no deep dive on Friday nor a TL:dr next week. The next Good Government Files will hit your email boxes on Friday, May 24.
Onward and Upward.
H/T to The Free Press